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Stimulus Ideals Conflict on the Texas Prairie

Mary Anne Piacentini and Wesley Newman on Katy Prairie Conservancy land. Federal funds may create a toll road nearby.Credit
Michael Stravato for The New York Times

WALLER, Tex. — Over the years the Katy Prairie has survived the cattle ranchers who tamed its fields, the rice farmers who cleared its wildflowers and tall grasses, and even the encroachment of Houston, some 30 miles to the east, whose spiraling outward growth turned most of the formerly lonesome prairie into subdivisions and strip malls.

Now the prairie is facing a new threat: the federal stimulus law.

Texas plans to spend $181 million of its federal stimulus money on building a 15-mile, four-lane toll road — from Interstate 10 to Highway 290 and right through the prairie — that will eventually form part of an outer beltway around greater Houston called the Grand Parkway.

The road exemplifies an unintended effect of the stimulus law: an administration that opposes suburban sprawl is giving money to states for projects that are almost certain to exacerbate it.

A new master-planned community called Bridgeland is rising on the prairie along the proposed site of the road; once completed, the development is expected to have 21,000 new homes on 11,400 acres. Other developers are eagerly awaiting the new road so they can start building on their empty land, too.

Though the road is welcomed by developers, it is bemoaned by transportation advocates who lament that it will lead people to settle far away from the main centers of employment — locking more people into long commutes.

“They should be spending the money where the people are,” said Robin Holzer, the chairwoman of the Citizens’ Transportation Coalition, a Houston-based advocacy group, who added that the money would have been better spent on transit or on alleviating congestion on roads through more developed areas.

President Obama made his opposition to sprawl explicit during a trip to Florida last month while he was pushing for the stimulus bill’s passage. “The days where we’re just building sprawl forever, those days are over,” he said, urging officials to employ “innovative thinking” when deciding how to spend their transportation money.

But to ensure that the money is spent quickly, the law leaves decisions of how to spend some $27.5 billion in transportation money up to the states — and quite a few are using their shares to build new and wider roads that will spur development away from their most populous centers.

North Carolina is extending Interstate 295 outside Fayetteville, which will benefit Fort Bragg but use up limited resources that were being sought by bigger areas like Charlotte and Raleigh. New Hampshire plans to widen Interstate 93, which gets clogged because so many residents of southern New Hampshire now commute to Boston for work. Lawmakers in Washington decided to widen several highways around the state, but snubbed projects sought by Seattle.

The plan to build a new leg of the Grand Parkway near here highlights the tension between some of the competing priorities of the Obama administration. The administration’s desire to change the way the country thinks about development, and to wean it from its dependency on foreign oil, is clashing with its need to spend stimulus money as fast as possible. And its call for creating or saving 3.5 million jobs is bumping up against its wish to curb sprawl, which eats up land but creates jobs in construction and strip malls and fast food restaurants that remain after the road builders have all gone away.

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Robin Holzer, chairwoman of a citizens group, says stimulus money should have been used to improve traffic flow in Houston.Credit
Michael Stravato for The New York Times

Mr. Obama made environmental concerns central to the $787 billion stimulus bill that Congress passed last month. The law provides money for renewable energy and for making federal buildings energy efficient, and it gives tax credits to buyers of plug-in hybrid cars. The logo the administration created for the economic recovery program is not only red, white and blue, but green too: it shows white stars on a blue background, white gears on a red background, and white leaves on a green background.

A White House spokesman, Nick Shapiro, said that the stimulus bill would promote “long-term sustainable development” by spending billions of dollars on renewable energy, mass transit, rail service and urban development, and he added that the choice of most transportation projects was left to states.

“The Recovery Act creates jobs by investing in immediate projects such as highways, bridges and tunnels — and within limitations to prevent waste, fraud, and ‘highways to nowhere’ — grants the states and their citizens broad discretion to choose which highway projects get funding,” Mr. Shapiro said in a statement.

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But some environmentalists here worry that the law will destroy part of the last 150,000 undeveloped acres of a prairie that was once 1,000 square miles — a treasured expanse of open land in the shadow of Houston that attracts bird watchers, hunters, hikers and prairie flower enthusiasts. The Sierra Club, which sometimes leads groups through the prairie to see its bald eagles, ducks, geese, herons and egrets, filed a lawsuit seeking to halt the project so another environmental review can be conducted.

“When you get out here, it seems you’re not even close to Houston,” Brandt Mannchen, a volunteer with the club, said on a recent tour of the prairie, where he pointed out native grasses and flowers. “This is what we’re trying to protect.”

The road won environmental approval from the federal government last year and took a step forward this month when county officials awarded several design and engineering contracts. It is more controversial for its proposed use of tolls — little loved in Texas — than for questions about land use. But supporters of the project, which has been discussed and planned for more than two decades, say that Houston will continue to expand westward with or without the road, and that it would be better to plan for the growth than to react to it once it comes.

“Our interest is to encourage what we call quality growth,” said Roger H. Hord, the president of the West Houston Association, a group of property owners and businesses in the area. “I understand there are concerns about sprawl. Houston is what it is. It will grow. We’ve had a pattern of it since we’ve started. The point we’re trying to make is, we can either plan for that growth and get in advance of it, or we can not plan and just let it happen.”

Mr. Hord pointed out that the road would connect two existing highways and said it would ease congestion on some of Houston’s other beltways. He said that an existing leg of the Grand Parkway, just to the south of the proposed leg, would give a sense of what the new stretch of the Grand Parkway might look like when it is done. The existing stretch is lined with strip malls and gas stations and drug stores and a huge 7,600-acre residential development called Cinco Ranch that is popular with families.

It feels a world away from the landscape of fields, ranches and prairie to the north — land that nature lovers have been patiently working for years to conserve.

When a rare swath of unspoiled prairie plant life — including switchgrass, prickly rattlesnake master and bright orange Indian paintbrush flowers — was threatened by bulldozers last summer, volunteers laboriously dug up more than 2,000 square feet of it, trucked it away, and replanted it on land protected by the Katy Prairie Conservancy, which has bought or protected nearly 18,000 acres of the prairie and hopes to save more than 50,000 acres, though developers have pushed the price of land up in recent years.

Hopping out of his pickup, shielded from a little welcome rain by his white Stetson, Wesley Newman, the conservancy’s land manager, showed off the rescued prairie garden outside the conservancy’s field office here.

“We actually have a little patch of intact prairie, if you will,” he said, standing among tufts of tall grass just a few miles west of the proposed highway.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Stimulus Ideals in Conflict on the Texas Prairie. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe